Where Did Cain Get His Wife?

A Study of Population Growth among Early People

People sometimes ask where Cain found a wife to marry. Since he was a son of
Adam and Eve, the first man and woman created by God, where would he find a
woman to marry? Some ask this sincerely. Others ask as a trick question,
thinking they have found some flaw in the Bible history of early man.

The Bible record is found in Gen. 4:16,17. After Cain had
killed Abel, he departed from the land where he and Abel had lived. He moved to Nod, a land east of Eden. There he and his wife had a
son whom he named Enoch. He also built a city which he also named
Enoch.

Observations about population growth

The fact that Cain, the son of Adam, built a city tells us
much about the increase in population in the early history of
mankind. If a city was built in the lifetime of a son of the very
first man, it follows that population grew rapidly and was
quickly civilized (in contrast to the views of evolutionists).

God had commanded Adam and Eve to reproduce and fill the earth (Gen. 1:28). Men in that time, before the flood, lived to great ages (see
chapter 5). Adam, for example, lived to be 930 years old before
he died (5:5), and most of his descendants before the flood lived
about 900 years. If there are no gaps in the
genealogies, this means Adam would have been alive following the
birth of Lamech, father of Noah, 8 generations later! Hence, although they eventually died,
people lived many
years before they died. This greatly multiplied the number of
people living on earth because, at any one time, there were many
generations still living.

Further, men were capable of having many children, and large
families were common. Noah was having children at age 500 (5:32).
All men in chap. 5 are recorded as having "sons and
daughters." In such long lifetimes with long periods of
fertility, many children could be born.

Using conservative estimates, Morris estimates (p. 143) that,
by the time Cain died, there could easily have been 120,000
people on the earth (certainly enough for there to be cities). By
the time of Noah there could easily have been seven billion -
more than on earth today! Do not think of Cain, Adam, and other
such people as walking around on a bare, lonesome, uninhabited
earth. The obeyed God's command to reproduce and fill the earth.

Where did Cain get his wife?

From the above information it is clear that there would have
been many women available for him to choose from eventually. With
people living such long lives, it would have been no problem for
a man to marry a woman 50 or even 100 years younger than him.
This would be no different, by comparison, than a man today marrying a woman 5 or 10 years
younger than himself.

Hence, Cain would have had plenty of women to choose from.
However, among Adam's sons and daughters (5:5), some of them
would have had to intermarry with brothers and sisters to get the
process of reproduction going. Perhaps Cain married a sister. If
not, he could have married a niece, etc. At this point there
would have been no laws against such close intermarriage. God had
commanded reproduction and such intermarriage would be needed to
obey the command. Intermarriage among close relatives was
forbidden only years later, and the reason was the danger of
genetic problems. That would have been no problem, however, in
the early history of man when long life spans prove there were
few mutant genes to cause genetic problems.

Remember that we do not know when Cain married. We do not know
how old he was when he killed Abel. He may or may not have
already been married at the time. We do not know how many
brothers or sisters he had, though we know he did have sisters (5:5).
As shown above, there were many people alive during his lifetime
and therefore many people for him to choose from.

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